Nathan Altice

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

The book cover for Paul Virilio's Lost Dimension (1991). The graphic design is a nightmare: fish are swimming around a red torii in inky blackness. The title and author text have a fold effect and gradients that look like shit.

You all can stop searching, because I found the worst academic book cover of all time.

Quite possibly one of the best/unfortunate typos from an academic text I've ever run across. (From MacKenzie's Human-Computer Interaction 2E textbook.)

AGAINST AI

teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com

We've acquired the historic game magazine Computer Entertainer.

As in, we got the rights. We own the magazine. And we're putting it into the Creative Commons for anyone to use for free.

Learn more: gamehistory.org/computerente...

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen.

By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

what strikes me about ai music is how it reproduces a particular style of mainstream engineering/production. not surprising since i’m sure most folks don’t recognize that part of the artistic equation, but i’m still frustrated that music is decomposed into genre/lyric/instrumentation only

🎮📜 It’s that time of year game history friends! 📜🎮

The July 2025 issue of ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is HERE! 🕹️📖 www.romchip.org 🌟 get cozy, get reading 📚✨

SUBSCRIBE: eepurl.com/crCul1
DONATE: bit.ly/3ve1oqZ

🧵 below!

Look at this beautiful screenshot

Donate to Support UCSC Dining Hall Workers' Strike on May 1st!, organized by Riley Pickenpaugh Our chapter of YDSA is raising money to help support our campus… Riley Pickenpaugh needs your support for Support UCSC Dining Hall Workers' Strike on May 1st!

UCSC dining hall workers need support for their May 1st strike. Their goal is a modest $500, so please kick in if you can. gofund.me/03fde845

A picture of the first screen of the Cherry Cough Syrup level 'Membrane.'

I'm hoping to have Cherry Cough Syrup finished by summer. All mainline levels are in place. Brand new UI. Lots of quality of life improvements. Now all the hard work of wrapping up loose ends.

This would be both a great look and a great sound design approach to a motorcycle racing/traversal game.

eerie how close our lists are, though blue jay way is my #1 and i really like the anthology version of tomorrow never knows

Neither am I—only our books are.

I'll also add, somewhat immodestly, that I'm on some next-level bullshit with my class slides.

I'm using this design to illustrate how Bogost structures the book, i.e., bookending individual examples of game criticism with an opening and closing argument about what game criticism is (and could be).

Ten years on, it's also a nice snapshot of what games were in conversation at the time.

A big part of this class is teaching students how to read and analyze difficult texts, whether they be academic papers or magazine images or YouTube videos. But I'm also trying to *demonstrate* the production of arguments using those same media, especially the medium of graphic design via slides.

A title slide reading 'How Do We Talk About Video Games?' incorporating an image of the game Florence.

A slide that provides a subway map-style layout of the chapters in Ian Bogost's How To Talk About Videogames.

At some point, I'll share more about my new class, Games as Technical Culture (now on my second iteration), but for now I'm excited to finally have a class that incorporates @ibogost.bsky.social 's How to Talk About Video Games as a means to talk about culturally-informed game criticism.

It's CHARITY MEGABUNDLE TIME! And there's some absolute gems in this one, including Tunic which is just an all-timer and everyone should have it in their library.

So let's do a little thread showcasing some of the games, and also the tools you might find handy to navigate this & other Itch bundles.

ROMchipJournal - Twitch Tinahacks Runs Super Mario World All Castles! | ROMchip Journal Fundraiser 2025 | !donate !schedule !raffle

It’s the @romchip.bsky.social fundraiser stream today!! 12 hours of game goodness streamed by various cool people to raise money to keep ROMchip going and open to everyone. Watch and donate!

twitch.tv/romchipjournal

Evocative posing, detailed line work, great colors. Really nice work!

Exceptionally thoughtful writing about exceptionally interesting games. 👇

Kendrick’s boldest move might’ve been bringing back ragged boot cut jeans with the early 00s wash.

we can and should be candid about what it means if someone says that they want to accumulate and centralize (and therefore validate or invalidate) the entire world in the form of data. what does that kind of central authority describe? on its face we're describing systems of authoritarian nature.

I've developed a new slide design style this quarter that I'm really happy with. It has a touch of 90s editorial graphic design.

You literally can’t walk past Jigglypuff ice cream and not buy it.

My family thought I was joking when I said Skibidi would feature heavily in my day one lecture for Games as Technical Culture. It's like they don't even know me.

gonna tell my kids this was Skibidi Toilet

If all this stuff is worthless, mind if we just take it? How 21st Century tech is doing the old colonial grift all over again.

The AI industry’s seizure of other people’s property, declaring it to be worthless, then pricing it at a premium once “processed” through them, has a historical precedent, and it’s not a good look. Yup. It’s good old colonialism.

open.substack.com/pub/joelmorr...

Posting Less Everyone's Doing It

“How do you live a digital life whose primary byproduct isn’t resentment? The most straightforward way: you stop posting. You leave the party.”